“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…” Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

I am fortunate enough to live in New England for half the year, and fall is the best time to be here. Last weekend my wife and I went out to Concord, Mass. and revisited (and circumnavigated) Walden Pond. That’s where Henry David Thoreau lived in a small cottage in the woods for a couple of years in the 1840s. There’s a replica of the cottage there today, and it’s about as spartan as you can imagine.

What would someone like Thoreau think about AI? It’s a pretty good bet that he would hate it. He’d probably think that if he’d lived much of his life in front of a screen—however intelligent its messages—he would discover that he hadn’t lived. Thoreau was primarily a writer, and were he to explore having generative AI do his writing for him, he’d feel that he actually hadn’t written, or learned anything from the process of writing.

Is there anything he would like about AI? Assuming he could get a wifi signal in his cottage, he’d probably be impressed by the amount of knowledge he could access. He loved to read; he wrote in Walden that “Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” If Thoreau were alive today, he might occasionally resort to genAI to summarize a book or one of his fellow Transcendentalists’ speeches.

However, I’m guessing that he’d generally say that a real book is far preferable to an AI summary of one. It takes longer to read, but the reader is far more likely to internalize, reflect on, and act on the content. Thoreau’s move to the woods—OK, there was a train and his parents’ house nearby, and he could pretty easily walk to them—was a signal that he believed some struggle—both intellectual and physical—was worthwhile. GenAI reduces or eliminates struggle, but there is a price to pay for that. The great article Your Brain on ChatGPT provides a good description of what that price is—little or no brain activity.

There is also little doubt that he would scorn the “996” (9AM to 9PM, 6 days a week) lifestyle of AI builders in Silicon Valley. He wrote about the workers in his time that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and even in the 1840s most people didn’t work that many hours.

Thoreau was also a surveyor for the town of Concord, and he painstakingly surveyed the circumference and depth of Walden Pond. Apparently that was a very difficult project; he did it in the winter so he could stand and walk on the ice and use various ancient measuring devices. But even if AI or some other advanced technology (satellite imagery+ AI?) could do those tasks much more easily, I doubt that Henry would have made use of them. No pain, no gain—and no reason to spend time in nature if you’re surveying in front of a screen.

Thoreau wouldn’t have liked AI much, but he would have really hated social media and the AI algorithms that drive it. If he spent so much time in the woods he obviously liked being alone; he wrote: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” He would probably despise the social media-based companionship that tends to make us dissatisfied with our own lives.

My trip to Walden Pond did not make me want to live in a small cottage in the woods, nor to recommend that for anyone else. But it did make me reconsider being connected all the time and thinking too much about the latest advances in AI. Walking around the pond or similarly getting out into nature made me realize that living a physical life should at least supplement a digital, AI-driven one. Every so often I need to get out into the world, leave my phone and laptop at home, enjoy the natural beauty, and think about what it means to dwell on this lovely planet.